Film-makers need to trust the audience

Scarecrow and
The King of Marvin Gardens – quirky, unstylised films made in the 60s and 70s that refused to smooth their rough edges. This bravery, Adam Mars-Jones argues, is what film-makers are missing today

The King Of Marvin Gardens (1972). Photograph: Moviestore Collection/Rex Feat

The label "independent film" doesn't mean what it once did, and the Sundance festival is part of the reason. The moment aspiring film-makers realised there was a potential shortcut to distribution and acclaim, they started smoothing off their rough edges – consciously or without even noticing – or at least they began to stylise themselves. Either way, the overall effect of the festival has not been to promote individuality but to erode it. So it's a mild beneficial shock to watch two American films of the early 1970s on re-release – not because they're masterpieces, exactly, but because they give the flavour of a different set of assumptions.

Scarecrow, directed by Jerry Schatzberg, won a prize at Cannes in 1973 (the Palme d'Or) then more or less disappeared. Like Easy Rider (1969), the film that persuaded Hollywood to take a generation seriously (a reaction to brute profitability, not aesthetic distinction), it's both a buddy movie and a road movie, those quintessential 1970s genres. The buddy-road-movie is a sort of anti-genre, like the picaresque in literature, useful as much as anything for what it lets you leave out. Episodic structure, lack of development, plain miscellaneousness – none of these counts as a defect. Many films of the period choose a tough ending over a sweet one, but would prefer to escape the tyranny of an ending altogether.

The heroes "meet cute" in Scarecrow, as hitchhikers competing for rides, though it's a benighted sort of cuteness, and they travel together from California through Colorado to Michigan. One of them – the charmer, Lion (short for his middle name of Lionel) – has been in the navy, saving money for the child he has never seen. The other – surly Max – has been in jail and has plans for a carwash business. Al Pacino, who plays Lion, had already appeared in The Godfather, but had made one of his first films for Schatzberg, The Panic in Needle Park, a couple of years earlier. Pacino would always have had a shot at movie stardom, by virtue of his prettiness rather than his intensity, but co-star Gene Hackman, with his theatre background and lumpy manner, has character actor written all over him, and needed a less formulaic approach to film-making (and specifically the breakthrough of Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde) to get noticed.

Schatzberg's background was as a photographer, for fashion magazines (Vogue and McCall's) rather than anything more hard-edged, but he certainly responds to unglamorous surroundings. The interior of one bar is so red it gives William Eggleston's famous photograph, Red Ceiling, a run for its money.

Hackman has cited Max as his favourite role, though the aggressiveness of the character seems beyond him – he can do terrier but not pitbull. He did his best work as two Harrys out of their depth: Harry Caul in Coppola's The Conversation (1974) and Harry Moseby inPenn's Night Moves (1975).

Scarecrow. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

It seems odd that a buddy movie such as Scarecrow should offer such rich pickings to female actors (Dorothy Tristan, Ann Wedgeworth, Eileen Brennan), but there's a sort of logic to it too. In the absence of a stereotypical love interest, female characters can be more freely developed. Could actors such as Ellen Burstyn, Karen Black, Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall, with their neediness, blankness, oddity, have become leading players in any other decade?

Penelope Allen, playing the mother of Lion's child, has only one scene – and it's a phone call at that, but she makes the most of it in terms of raw bewildered emotion. It is pleasing that Pacino kept in touch, casting her as Queen Elizabeth in Looking for Richard (1996). In the movies it is possible to share a scene without ever having met, as Bowie and Dietrich did in Just a Gigolo, and Allen and Pacino don't even have a scene together in Scarecrow.

The light presence of music in films is one of the striking features of the period, though Easy Rider itself was virtually a jukebox musical of surefire counterculture hits. There is barely 10 minutes of music in the whole of Scarecrow, though with current releases you can get 10 minutes of music in the first five. Much of the music on the soundtrack is being heard by the characters as well as us, even if the dialogue sometimes has to work hard to make this plausible. Elgar in a honky-tonk – really? Cue helpful dialogue to prepare us: "High school has its graduation here every year … they've even got Pomp and Circumstances on the jukebox."

Nothing shows a lack of faith in the audience like a reliance on emotional signals from the music. By my reckoning, the arrival of the CD was the worst thing that ever happened to the cinema. As soon as it was technically possible for an original soundtrack album to be 70-plus minutes long, there was pressure on films to make it so. More often than not, film music claims to bring you closer to the emotions of the story while actually thrusting itself between you and your reactions. The film score, as we have come to know it, is like the "friend" who finishes your sentences for you.

If Hackman is an unlikely star of the sort the period made possible, the same goes double for Jack Nicholson. Bob Rafelson's The King of Marvin Gardens, made in 1972 and consolidating the success of Five Easy Pieces, shows him in a rare passive role. Nicholson was an old friend of the director and co-wrote the 1968 Monkees vehicle, Head – not the most roadworthy vehicle, admittedly. He plays David Staebler, a confessional radio performer summoned to Atlantic City, at that time a decrepit resort catering to the decrepit, by his brother Jason (Bruce Dern), who claims to be on the brink of a big property deal involving a tropical island. Nicholson hoists those eyebrows only once in the whole film (most of the time they're hidden by his glasses), and retreats from the assertiveness right away with a rabbity twitch.

David is buttoned-down and buttoned-in. He drinks only milk, though for good manners he has it served in a wine glass rather than a tumbler. When Warren Beatty orders milk in a redneck bar in The Parallax View (1974), it's a provocation. Here, nobody mentions David's little foible. It's plausibly a bit of character-drawing, as if his troubled digestion needs soothing, as well as a gift to the director of photography, László Kovács, providing the maximum visual contrast with Jason's bloody mary.

Easy Rider (1969). Photograph: Columbia/Allstar

Kovács had already worked on Easy Rider, and already been used by Altman and Bogdanovich. Vilmos Zsigmond, another Hungarian émigré, was the cinematographer on Scarecrow – having directed photography for Boorman and (again) for Altman. (He's still working.) The shadowed America of 1970s films was often being seen through European eyes, though these two films operate very differently. In Scarecrow, the landscape makes an unpredictable contribution. It is a character in its own right. The King of Marvin Gardens is more artfully constructed – there is a sense that real locations have been chosen to chime with what is in the script.

The narrative is elliptical, with gaps strongly signalled, so that, for instance, a daytime scene outside a hotel cuts to the same people in the same place, but at night. Perhaps the disorientation is integral to the script, or perhaps some fierce editing produced the effect. Emergency restructurings are commonplace in film-making – the first cut of Annie Hall, for instance, was three hours long, which seems inconceivable now (I learned this from It Don't Worry Me, Ryan Gilbey's book on 1970s American cinema). Perhaps there was round after round of high-risk work in the cutting rooms, Russian roulette a la The Deer Hunter over and over again, until the fatality of Heaven's Gate in 1980 and the end of the cycle of possibilities that started with Easy Rider.

In The King of Marvin Gardens it is touching to see the awkwardness of the embraces between the brothers, from a time when the manly hug was a new mechanism, a docking between two fragile structures. Dern is much the taller man. Nicholson half holds back, then seems to want the intimacy to be prolonged.

Dern's Jason is all wheedling confidence, though the Atlantic City setting can seem almost too ready-made a metaphor. Naturally, those like Jason who think they've got the game worked out, that they have a system for winning, are the greatest suckers of all. The varied outfits Jason wears paint his self-portrait in fantasy: the cricket jumper suggesting suavity, the Hawaiian shirt insisting on a relaxation that isn't really available to him. When he drapes his camel coat over his shoulders, in the style of an old-fashioned mobster, it's as if he's already seen Burt Lancaster's turn in Atlantic City (1980) and is paying homage.

The King of Marvin Gardens shares Scarecrow's parsimonious attitude to music. The great scene where Ellen Burstyn's Sally has a bonfire of the vanities on the chilly beach, burning her clothes and burying her cosmetics as a sign that she resigns from sexual competition, then cutting her hair, is done without any nudging from a score. A change of camera angle, showing her new loosely cropped hairstyle beside the flames, is all that is needed to summon up the sufferings of Dreyer's Joan of Arc.

• Scarecrow is showing at various cinemas in June. The King of Marvin Gardens is showing at the BFI Southbank from 31 May to 6 June.